Distortion photography is all photography, it only differs by how much.

We talk about “the human eye” as though we were cyclopses. But we have two eyes and they work in tandem to make the world around us make sense. 

I keep seeing new hashtags, and different apps suggest different ones. Apparently, I am really into #distortionphotography. But this itself seems so distorted to me. 

The human eye is a beautiful phrase. It makes me feel like there’s some lovely vision we all share together and when i see the clouds drift by I can almost taste that vision (i have synesthesia which is cool, and Nabokov had it, but it certainly doesn’t let me make realistic statements about sensory experience) we share. The immortal pain and beauty of existence. The tangled tendrils of all our loves and hates all together. 

But that’s not really what we mean when we talk about “the human eye” in terms of photography – what we see with our eyes, and what our cameras see with their lenses. 

A camera is a dead thing. A wonder of human invention to be sure, but has only cold mirrors and lenses, microprocesseors, and , if you have a sufficiently advanced one, AI controlled features like steady cam. Importantly, a camera usually only has a single lens, a single eye. It cannot capture the actual depth that our gelly parallax can. Even our new phones that have a cluster of camera lenses aren’t going to capture it. 

The simple fact is that our human brain has two very alive anatomical cameras peering into the world. And each of them have a semblance of the panorama function – that is on all of the time! We can’t not have peripheral vision (barring injury/disease). And our brains are brilliant – sorting and making sense of all that detail for us without even having to think about it! 

Because of all this extra detail we take for granted, no camera will ever be able to capture it. 

And so no picture is a human perception. It is an abstraction. A choice. A distortion of how a human perceives the world.

All photography is a distortion of what the human eye actually sees; it only matters how much you want to play with it. I hope to grow more distorted over time, to be fully immersed in the surreal and the abstract.